Here’s a clue to a song in the wilderness list … try and name it.
Photograph: Alamy

What would the world be, once bereftOf wet and of wildness? Let them be left,O let them be left, wildness and wet;Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins put this plea in the poem Inversnaid. But humans are drawn to regions unknown and we climb Everest because it is there; Public Service Broadcasting providing a glistening tune for the summit of the world, highlighting our desire to explore and chart the world; to know its extent but not to know it profoundly.

And yet we marvel at the wilderness – as Peak by Herbert does. The song ascends to unknown places and – like hiking or climbing in the wild – it changes our perception and brings joy. The peak is reached when a mighty church organ plays over the trance-like, deep house beats and I imagine viewing a panorama that renders me speechless except for a single “Wow!”

In contrast, Judy Collins sings of the forbidding Greenland shores – a beautifully austere terrain. In Farewell to Tarwathie her voice is as pure as any snow and ice covered wilderness; the whale song accompaniment functioning like minimal, echoing dub and further embedding the song in the natural world.

Lord Huron could be a shipwrecked Tarwathie sailor. He’s entered an unfamiliar wilderness and has only Lonesome Dreams for company. Alone in the vastness, he questions his fate and place in the world.

Unlike Lord Huron, Culture turn to their faith to lead them through the testing wilds. They sing I’m Alone in the Wilderness and humbly ask Jah to reach out to them.

However, some prefer seclusion. Timothy Treadwell sought the epic wilderness, feeling more at one with the wild and its inhabitants than with urbanites. Burning Hearts sing of his final hours: the foxes dancing around his feet, the bear reverting to predator. Treadwell knew the wild but fatally retained his recklessness.

The grandeur of the North American wilderness also inspired Map Ref. 41°N 93°W. The song can be taken as a wish to explore its magnificent topography. Wire sing of cartographers mapping the land, but do mapmakers really see the natural world on those lines of latitude and longitude?

The character riding on America’s Horse with No Name certainly doesn’t. The desert “has plants and birds and rocks and things”. He cannot name nor understand the land properly, but it gives him peace of mind and helps him remember his name.

Meat Puppets have even more of a desert-frazzled quality to their sound. The plateau they sing of has been kept by a caretaker who has left behind an illustrated book about birds. But there’s concern here, “Where is the next plateau?” ask the people greedy for more wilderness.

Adrian Belew’s Men in Helicopters provides an answer: we are laying the wilderness and its wildlife to waste. Gerard Manley Hopkins would despair.

And yet the wilderness can still inspire terror. Few bands depict scenery and climate in their music like the Triffids did. In Lonely Stretch a man seeking his unrequited love takes a wrong turn in the Australian outback. The isolation and his broken heart driving him to the edge of insanity.

Violent madness pervades Death Valley ’69 by Sonic Youth. The remoteness and harshness of the valley placing its inhabitants outside society – in a world where our values and morals no longer apply.

Even more terrifyingly, Primordial adopt the perspective of an amoral, pestilential wilderness. It will not distinguish between men, women or children – all will die as it releases its poison. The Gathering Wilderness is a ferocious song, perhaps we should heed the words of Hopkins.